Last week Andrew Tyrie told The Times the government’s growth strategy was not coherent or consistent. In remarkably outspoken comments, the chairman of the Treasury select committee said policies such as the Big Society or the green agenda were “at best irrelevant to the task in hand, if not downright contradictory to it”.
His reaction to George Osborne’s speech on Monday however had a very different flavour:
You can see some consistency in this speech and I think it will be widely welcomed not only by the party but by people across the country, who also need a growth strategy to help them move forward.
Was Osborne’s speech so dramatic that it completely changed Tyrie’s mind, or did his comments have more to do with this incident, caught by the BBC, when Tyrie was led briskly away by those two Number 10 heavies, Steve Hilton and Craig Oliver?
Tyrie unsurprisingly denied being “nobbled” by Number 10, but it is telling that he didn’t attend a fringe event on growth this afternoon at which he was billed to attend. In his place, rising Tory star and Osborne uber loyalist, Matthew Hancock.
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey
